Antenna specification

An ANT can be given as a single string (literal/pattern/regular expression), single integer ID, a range of integer IDs or a comma separated list of integers. For VLA-specific reasons (see Section 3.2), only for antenna specifications, integers are first converted to strings and matched against the antenna names. E.g.

• VLA:N1 corresponds to antenna named "VLA:N1".
• 1,2,3 corresponds to antennas named "1", "2" and "3".
• 1$\sim$ 3 corresponds to antennas named "1", "2" and "3".
• VLA:N* corresponds to all antennas who's name starts with "VLA:N".

The precise logic applied to the antenna specification (ANT) is as follows:

1. If ANT is an integer index (or a list or range), it is first used as a name (e.g. the index 1 is converted to a string "1" etc.) and matched against the NAME column of ANTENNA sub-table. If no match is found, it is treated as an integer index and matched against the antenna indices.

2. If ANT is a string which cannot be converted to an integer, it is first matched against the NAME column of the ANTENNA sub-table. If no match is found, match against the STATION column is attempted.